About

“A Wild X Appears!”, also known as “Wild X Appeared!,” is a snowclone used to indicate the unexpected advent of a character or object. The dramatic phrase was inspired by the in-game announcement of random monster fights in Nintendo’s Pokémon series. In discussion threads, images containing the message may be used in reference to a preceding post made by another user.

Origin

Nintendo released the first Pokémon games in the United States, Red Version and Blue Version[4], on September 28th, 1998. As the player walks through tall grass in the game, they have the ability to encounter wild monsters to catch for their team. In the original bundle of Red and Blue, the message “Wild X Appeared!” appeared each time the player encountered a Pokemon character during gameplay. In subsequent releases, the wording was changed to “A wild X appeared!” Though the phrasal template typically follows the present tense form of “A wild X appears!,” this particular wording has been never used in the Pokémon series.

A Wild Snorlax Appears

Before becoming a snowclone meme, “A wild Snorlax appears!” became a popular caption on photos of overweight people. Snorlax[5] is a first Generation Normal-type Pokémon known for it’s large belly and sloth-like behavior. In October 2007[6], the phrase was paired with a photo of a woman in a yellow Pittsburgh Steelers shirt that had been circulating on the internet for at least two years prior.[7] The first YTMND[3] page was created on November 5th, 2007, with another well-known photo[8] of an audience member at a talk show.

Spread

In Discussion Forums

One specific instance of the phrase used on message boards and other forums consisted of a Gameboy Pokémon scene with the letters “OP”, meaning “original poster”, in place of the monster and the caption “Wild FAG appeared!” One of the earliest dated instances of this image was posted on November 30th, 2008 on the image dump section of a Dutch graphic designer’s site[9], but its origin is unknown.

Pokémon Battles

Pokémon attack actions are sometimes combined with “A Wild X Appears” or “It’s super effective!” in another parody series known as Fake Pokémon Battles. One of the earliest instances of a video battle using the phrase was uploaded to YouTube on May 13th, 2008.